PREDICT 2 Study Experience: Set-up Day + The Study Pack

This post is the second of a series on my participation in the PREDICT 2 study. Click here to read the first post of the series.

Today was set-up day. I started off with a coworker (and friend, @Meghan) helping me install the glucose monitor on my left (non-dominant) arm. It takes 16 hours or so to calibrate, and I’ll keep it on for the duration of the study. Later I also “activated” my activity tracker (“activate” being I took it out of the package and put it on my left wrist like a watch).

Later in the morning I did potentially the strangest thing I’ll ever do at work. I’ll spare you the details; I’ll just say that the stool sample had to be collected during the set-up day so I did what had to be done.

Before lunch I gave my saliva sample, which was quite literally spitting into a tube. I carried all of my samples home, and I’ll mail them back later this week. I had a call with a nutritionist from the study on my way home from work, and she confirmed that I had done all of my to-do items for the day. She talked me through the first couple of days of the study, asked if I had any questions, and let me know that if I ever needed anything, someone from the study would be able to chat with me through the app. That’s definitely a benefit to having collaborators from both the U.S. and the U.K. – different time zones so someone is always available for the study participants.

For tomorrow, “day 1,” I’ve got my standardized breakfast defrosting in the refrigerator and my standardized lunch ready to go. It looks like it’s muffins and chocolate shakes for me tomorrow! Of course, I can eat whatever I want for dinner, and I’ll just need to do some careful logging of the ingredients and serving sizes so the study team knows what nutrients I’m consuming.

Standardized meals for day 1 of the study. I’ll scan the barcodes with the app to log each meal.

The study pack

I received my study pack in the mail on the Friday afternoon before I would begin the set-up day on a Monday. The box had several smaller boxes inside with labels and storage instructions. There was a long, thin box labeled “muffins” that I stored in the freezer, and I put a smaller box of other shelf-stable food items in the refrigerator. Non-food items included:

Food scale for weighing food ingredients for my meals that are not standardized by the study team

Cup and shaker for preparing shakes

Photo card for taking pictures of all the non-standardized meals that I eat

Study guide with information about the study

Tape measure for doing body measurements

Wearable activity tracker

Glucose monitor, reader, and adhesive patches

Return boxes for samples and devices

Sample collection kits for at-home collection and in-lab collection

My experience so far has been that the study team is extremely organized and prepared. In a white paper prepared by the ZOE team (“Overview of The ZOE Scientific Project for Researchers & Clinicians”) in June 2019, the authors mentioned that the PREDICT 2 study includes upgrades from PREDICT 1 that “improve data collection” and “reduce participant burden.” I’m pondering if those upgrades include the study pack experience because everything is extremely organized, and I can see how an unorganized box would be particularly disconcerting for the study participant, especially at the beginning of the study.

That’s all I have for today, the set-up day. Tomorrow I’ll be posting a day 1 reflection as well as discussing the study that started it all: PREDICT 1.